I managed to press the first button faster than I normally do. This level can be really annoying, depending on how the fish behave during it. This level, like Oasis, is also straightforward, and doesn't need any comment from me. :( The end door has the end-of-level trigger right inside it, so all I need is a boost to push me slightly into the door to trigger it. I really didn't like this level., and you'll see why when you watch the run. This is probably the easiest level in the game for me, it's a straight forward run, the only area of note being the large hopper room where I kill the initial waves with the rocket launchers splash damage then when the extra hoppers start spawning further along the walls I switch to the tommygun and exhaust each hopper spawn in turn. There's not much else to say about this level which isn't self-explanatory, except that keeping all the Kleer from jumping in the water with the Stone Ankh is harder than it looks. I also have to keep at least one of the flying Gnaar from pressing the left switch alive to jump back over the Wall of Darkness further in the level. In the room with the Ankh on a pillar, I need to press one button (The left one specifically) to get the pillar to lower enough so that I can slopejump onto it, which means I skip half of this puzzle. The Aludran Reptiloid Highlander takes 14 rockets to kill, but you can substitute the last two for Tommygun bullets which saves about a second or two. Grazing the side of the bull sends you in the direction perpendicular to that side, which is nice for moving in one direction since you can just keep grazing opposite sides, but here I didn't manage to keep the pattern up. Here's also where you'll see the first truly random part of the run. Here I kill the Kamikaze riding the bull first, since it has a very annoying habit of getting in the way of the bull boosting me. Jumping up the wall at the end of the large square arena room lets you exit early. (This is also in the Serious IL for this level) It's possible to jump up the slope in the room after the Kamikaze in this level in one try but I didn't manage it, luckily the flying Gnaar was just behind me to give me a stepping stone. I use a trick to jump on the flying Gnaar's head to get to the upper level faster, which shaves a few seconds off.
In the long corridor area where I jump randomly the jump avoids a trigger which closes the door ahead of me and spawns a Young Arachnoid and some Gnaar, which I have to kill to get the door to open. I use the slope jumping trick in the room after that (and jump over a Female Gnaar on the way) and in the next area I kill the Bull, since it has an annoying habit of knocking me out of the doorway at the end if I don't.Īgain the slopejump was used here for a little speedboost. I press the secret wall to get the Tommygun here since it makes killing the hoppers faster and costs no time at all. The hopper trap in the next room is triggered by killing all three Kamikazes in the tunnel before it, so killing them as soon as possible makes progression faster.
I kill the two Gnaar because their deaths trigger a Kleer Skeleton spawn, and I use that as a stepping stone to get over the barrier at the bottom of the dark slope. I leave the first Kamikaze I see alive, since killing him makes more spawn and makes it more annoying a bit further ahead.
The rest of the level is just precise movement along walls and barely skimming the shotgun to pick it up. (I was 45 seconds off that time with this run, which I find impressive considering that it's hard to do long distance aiming at 30fps) Anyhoo here's a list of tricks I used in each level, along with things you might wonder about in the run.Īt the start I jump up the slope instead of walking since you gain altitude when jumping off a slope, which means I move up it faster. It wasn't as bad as I thought, and I came close to beating the run I'd captured on demo previously. After completing a very good run however, I discovered that every multi-level demo I created desynced at the second level, which was rather annoying, so I had to resort to Fraps for this, meaning I had to play at 30fps at 640x480. Originally I started running this without using Fraps to record, since using the built-in demo recorder would enable me to play at 1280x1024 at 60fps, which makes aiming/movement easier for me.